Something terrible happened at 3:22 PM on May 25. Something that I had feared more than anything for ten months. My iPhone broke. I was walking in the hall way and got bumped and my phone flew out of my hand, hit the ground face down, and the screen was shattered (see pic below, may disturb some people). My heart was shattered. Thus I began the journey of selecting the next best suitor as I knew the next iPhone was coming (everyone knows there’s an iPhone hardware refresh in June).
I immediately called Rogers and told them my phone was broken and I needed to replace it. I had read before that Rogers, in an attempt to bolster ahead of the other two providers, had launched a device replacement program, called “Rogers handset protection guarantee” which would replace your handset for a subsidized price (using a refurbished unit) so long as you have a minimum of 12 months remaining on your contract (if you have less than 12 months the contract is extended to 12 months). Awesome; had I been with any other carrier I’d be in for a whole lot more money!
So I enquired about getting a replacement and the surprisingly helpful CSR told me that there were three handsets available to me — the iPhone 3G (not 3GS) would be $549 ($50 off retail), a Blackberry Curve 8900 would be $299, a Blackberry Bold 9000 would be $329, and the LG Eve (an Android device) would be $0. Honestly none of those options sounded reasonable;
- the LG Eve is an Android handset but is a previous generation device, running stock 1.5 (with no knowledge of updates to or past 1.6), using a resistive touch screen, has a poor QWERTY keyboard, and is plagued by bugs (according to reviews).
- the Blackberry Curve 8900 seemed at first like a compromise Blackberry, but actually out specs the Bold in a few places, notably the camera and physical size/weight, but would mean bye-bye GMail push, well-made apps, touch keyboard, and dignity (I’ve knocked the Blackberry in a lot of places). Regardless, this was choice number 1.
- The Blackberry Bold 9000 was my first choice but I gave myself a minimum of three days to think it over. The first problem was that it’s a previous generation device with poor battery (according to reviews). I’d also heard that Blackberry OS 6 wasn’t going to the Bold 9000 (only the Bold 2/9700). Also the camera was mediocre, etc…
So with my initial decision made, I decided to call Rogers to order a Blackberry. I was just saying “yes” to completing to order when I brought up that I would need to switch my data plan over to a Blackberry data plan. If I had been any other consumer this wouldn’t be a problem — Rogers charges the same rate for Blackberry data and smartphone data ($25 for 500MB, $30 for 1GB, …) but I got my iPhone in July during a promotion to get a 6GB data plan for $30 which was a battle to get back then. At the same time, Rogers had a promotion for Blackberrys where if you inquired, you could get 6GB of Blackberry data for $30. The switch wouldn’t change any pricing. But Rogers didn’t know of that or wouldn’t allow me to do that.
My next venture was to perform a trick I’d heard of, called APN3CON, where the CSR has to type APN3CON into the SOC section and it makes your data plan function on a regular smartphone/internet stick and on Blackberrys. Awesome. I talked to Rogers and the CSR downright said I was crazy and making up lies. He thought it was a prank and verbally attacked me for it, constantly saying “who told you this?” Further more I emailed Rogers to confirm that APN3CON works. They said it does and gave me strict instructions as to how to get it on my account, but by this time I was fed up and my mind changed — Blackberry may have awesome relevance in business, but the way the interface works, and the age of the platform, and the build quality all told me that this was not the phone for me. I’d moved on to bigger and better things.
Now, almost seven hundred words later I get to my decision, the Nexus One. The Nexus One has been supported by Rogers in Canada — of course it would work with 2G unsupported using the T-Mobile version, but however I don’t have 3G where I live or within 100KM of where I live (screw you Rogers), it would be nice to have it eventually.
I ordered my Nexus One with an inscription on June 2nd at 5PM, costing $556.16 US dollars ($581 Canadian, currency converted through Mastercard at price of purchase). The phone was delivered on June 7, and on delivery from DHL, a fee of $78 local sales tax including a $7 brokerage fee was paid. All said and done, the phone cost ~$660. Not so bad, considering that the iPhone 3GS retails for $699 before taxes.
I’ve now had the Nexus for a full school week, and there have been a lot of good reactions to the phone, a lot asking whether I prefer this to my iPhone. That’s an interesting question, because the 3GS is a different generation of phone — back in the ~500MHz, medium-density screen generation, not the high-resolution, 1GHz, 500MB memory generation of the Nexus One, Evo, and iPhone 4. I’m happy with my decision; I’ve found that my generally poor Rogers reception has been immensely improved with the Nexus, even though both have antennas in the lower quarter of the phone (where one’s hand would more often than not cover it) and the Nexus has a metal case.
Switching to Android wasn’t at all difficult — at first I noticed all of the facets of the OS that Apple had gotten right that had yet to be polished, most notable the camera interface doesn’t rotate with the phone (the iPhone will rotate for 3 sides of the phone), the Android browser is far slower than Safari, the home screen icons do nothing to move as you drag other icons, and the phone does require more than one physical button to operate! It took a lot of time to pickup how the other buttons (the resistive buttons for back, context-menu, home, and search) would become useful. Also the trackball. That is a lot of ugly in the world of Apple, but has proven useful sometimes, and I now usually use it as a clicker for long-presses to paste text single-handed. That’s another difference; the iPhone may have been late to copy/paste but has done text selection (placing the cursor in a text field even) really well, with the floating magnifying glass. On the other hand, the N1 requires that you tap-and-guess, and use the trackball for greater accuracy. The Android (as of 2.1) doesn’t allow you to select any non-editable text.
As per apps, there may be a lot fewer Android apps, but they all seems snappy and very competitive with iPhone apps, albeit there are fewer drop dead gorgeous apps. For example Tweetie… or “Twitter for iPhone” is a beautiful app that I loved from day one on my iPhone. Twitter for Android is a powerful, versatile app, which looks good, behaves well, and feels Android-native, but it doesn’t have to fluidity of Tweetie.
I mentioned the Android browser is slower… and I meant it. The iPhone browser isn’t so hot on EDGE compared to Opera Mini (for obvious reasons) and certainly can’t compete with WiFi, but the Android browser is even slower. Even after the page has loaded, the browser keeps loading for many minutes, and the load priority isn’t straightforward — the iPhone always loaded text, layout, then images whereas Android seems to load and render in a top-down fashion. Opera Mini for Android seems promising though, and like on the iPhone, I’ll more than likely use that most of the time.
I was a pretty cocky iPhone user — I always mocked Blackberry for it’s antiquity, Windows Mobile for it’s downright outmoded-ness, and Android for it’s battery life, memory usage, and crashing. In the days I’ve had the N1, I’ve yet to have a system crash, application crash, or even an application go unresponsive. Holding the home button provides a 6-way application switcher for the last used applications, most of which snap back to life just how they were left, whether they stayed running or not. In fact, the Rogers My Account app, which yes, on EDGE takes seemingly forever to load, will even continue to load in the background. There are tons of pleasant surprises like that in this OS, that I never really thought about on the iPhone.
There are some areas where I hope to see some future polish thought, for example, when Twitter times out (I am on a shoddy EDGE connection) I get a message like “Tweet cannot be posted at this time.” followed by a Java-style error message including something along the lines of something.socketConnection.timeOut(). Most users would have no idea what that means, and would probably question someone like me as to whether something was wrong with their phone. A simple “Posting tweet timed out” would be adequate.
Over the coming weeks I’ll have some posts on good Android apps and life with this new fangled thing. For once it will be nice seeing the iPhone from the other side of the court. Here’s to new beginnings to all those who are encouraging Apple to innovate; choose Android.